The present invention relates to coatings for comestibles, and particularly to chewing gum pellet coatings and syrups therefore that are made using an emulsion of flavor, acid or both.
Comestibles, and chewing gum in particular, often in pellet form, are frequently enclosed with a hard or soft coating. Coatings provide an opportunity for the manufacturer to vary product characteristics such as taste, appearance and nutritional value.
Historically the coatings were made from sugar syrups. In resent years, efforts have been devoted to producing sugarless hard coatings for use on chewing gum. Sugarless coatings which have been investigated include coatings containing compounds such as xylitol, sorbitol, mannitol, hydrogenated starch hydrolyzates, enythritol, and mixtures thereof. For example, See U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,248,508; 5,207,061 and 5,376,389; and PCT Publication Nos. WO 95/07622 and WO 95/07625.
Many coatings for comestible, and particularly for chewing gum, include a flavor. Most flavors used in coatings are oil based. The coatings are typically made from aqueous syrups. The coatings are built up by applying an aliquot of syrup to the product to be coated and allowing the syrup to coat the product and then dry. Often the flavor is applied between coating layers of syrup, but may be mixed with the syrup. One difficulty arises from the fact that the coating syrups are applied in a hot liquid state so that they can more rapidly dry. As a result, volatile flavors, such as fruit flavors, cannot be mixed into the coating syrup because the volatile components of the flavor will evaporate during the coating operation. Even if the flavors are preblended with the coating syrup just prior to being applied to the cores, there is still undesirable flavor loss.
Sometimes it is desirable to use food grade acid, such as citric acid, in a coating so that the coating will have a tart taste. One problem is that if acid is mixed with a hot aqueous sugar syrup, the sugar will start undergoing inversion, and will then not form a hard coating and will be difficult to dry because the inverted sugar prevents crystallization.
Also, it has been discovered that when acid is added to sugarless syrups which are then used to make a sugarless coating, the resulting hard shell coating has a tendency to crack.
Thus, while there have been many improvements made to coatings, and particularly sugarless coatings, there is still a need for a way to reduce volatilization of flavor compounds used in making coatings, and overcome the drawbacks noted above when including a food acid in a coating.